Page 461 of
Print Edition A prophet’s role is to say the truth

The work of a prophet depends on getting the truth up and standing by it, especially when the truth about the human condition is finally found. Despite the sceptical and cynical responses a resigned mind projects onto an unresigned mind, it is vital that an unresigned mind never succumb to the coercive cynicism, but keeps thinking and talking truthfully. Christ never weakened to cynicism. He said, ‘I have spoken openly to the world. I always taught in synagogues or at the temple, where all the Jews come together. I said nothing in secret’ (John 18:20). He explained the predicament the unresigned mind is faced with when he said, ‘Do you bring in a lamp to put it under a bowl or a bed? Instead, don’t you put it on its stand?’ (Mark 4:21).

The confidence and certainty of denial-free, holistic-thinking prophets made them appear to be arrogant to people in the resigned, egocentric, mechanistic world because, to use Carl Jung’s term, people tended to ‘project’ their way of thinking onto others. They tended to think everyone sees the world the way they see it. In this case the resigned mind assumes everyone else is resigned. Projecting their own blind, evasive uncertainty on the world, resigned, mechanistic minds could, if they didn’t take the trouble to look into the situation, doubt and attack the certainty of the unresigned thinker or prophet.

The unresigned mind’s honesty can certainly be immensely confronting and thus threatening to the resigned mind, but as well as this the authoritativeness of the unresigned mind can, if care isn’t taken, be misunderstood by resigned minds as arrogance and symptomatic of the delusion exhibited by dangerous false prophets. If the situation is treated with sensitivity it is not difficult to differentiate between true and false prophets, because there is an immense and easily ascertained difference between the exceptionally sound and the exceptionally deluded. Again, Christ was drawing attention to the difference when he said, ‘Satan can’t drive out Satan’. A person simply cannot begin to look into the human condition if he is a deluded, egocentric charlatan, a madman, manipulating people’s lives for his own self-aggrandisement, as the previously mentioned Four Corners television program misportrayed me as doing. If responsible action is not taken, or if the threat of the unresigned mind’s denial-free Page 462 of
Print Edition thinking causes deliberate misportrayal of the sound thinking as being the work of a deluded false prophet, then undeserved and indeed criminal misrepresentation of the denial-free thinker can occur. The responsibility of people who are not able to appreciate the world of true prophets is to trust in the democratic principle of freedom of expression that allows new ideas to be openly and fairly assessed on their merit.

The truth is, the greatest care of all needs to be taken in the realm where the subject of the human condition is at issue, because while it is the realm where deluded false prophets have operated, it is also the realm where true prophets operate, the realm where true prophets seek to find understanding of the human condition, the realm from which the liberating understanding of the human condition has to come. The realm where the subject of the human condition resides is the area where most prejudice can occur, yet from where the greatest benefits to humanity also come.

It is a very muddied pool to have to wade into but doing so—addressing the subject of the human condition—is the most important of tasks. If blatant intolerance and prejudice towards different ways of thinking is allowed then humanity can never hope to free itself from the human condition. The fundamental purpose of democracy is to allow freedom of expression, and thus the development of new ideas, and thus ultimately the acceptance of the 2-million-year dreamt of and hoped for arrival of the totally revolutionising, desperately needed, all-important breakthrough understanding of human nature; of ourselves.